http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660The other thing to keep in mind is that the average skilled developer C# developer would *initially* come up with something like iteration #1 as a solution, while a skilled C++ would initially come up with something like iteration #3. It's true that with unmanaged code you can squeeze more out of it, that's a no-brainer, but what percentage of real-world apps out there is there ever enough emphasis on squeezing performance? Companies look at bottom line costs. Add up the hours spent refactoring and look at the _Cost_ of that performance. No one's going to give a rats ass if you can shave off less than 0.1s if it's going to cost them 10+ hours to do it. So in the end for a managed application written by competent developers you're going to get something like Iteration #1 managed or maybe a bit worse for less $ than something like Iteration #3 or 4 of unmanaged C++. (And plenty of risk that you're going to get a few iteration #1 & 2's in there as well.) http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment10http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment10Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:43:13 GMTWhy do people even follow Jeff's blog, the guy is an idiot. Glorified writer, amateur programmer. http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment9http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment9Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:56:26 GMTNo comment, I stop reading Jeff blog year and half because he seems like 'Microsoft Slave' to me. if the C++ developer can't write the version 6 from the first time so he is bad developer, also I don't know what kind of C++ classes he use to get this performance, I hope he didn't use STL because no company use it. Also the people that used C++, I guess they use it when they have a critical project. And about .NET performance this is really the biggest joke, because I don't use it in any critical project, I already implemented a lot of .NET namespaces to improve the performance and reduce the memory consumption and on average my classes was faster by about 50% and some time by factor of 2x and it reduce the memory by about 20 ~30% and this classes includes: String, Parallelism, Collection, Serialization, Refraction. http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment8http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment8Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:36:55 GMT@Demis Bellot - about the only managed GUI app I use semi-frequently is paint.net, and it has a very slick gui - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET)http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment7http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment7Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:55:24 GMTAlso one thing that I find C/C++ seem to excel at over managed languages is rich-client GUI development. I'm really impressed with the speed of native apps like chrome and spotify and have been hard pressed to find any examples of C#/.NET (or even Java) GUI apps with the same level of speed and responsiveness. For the most part managed winforms/wpf/silverlight clients show good enough perf results to get the job done, but to me they always feel more sluggish then a well designed native C/C++ app. It would be good if you did a blog post calling out for the best examples of .NET GUI clients that are available as I think it would be good to see what can be accomplished with a managed .NET GUI. http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment6http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment6Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:41:49 GMT@Demis - cute ;-p I'll have to re-double my protobuf-net efforts to keep an edge! http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment5http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment5Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:36:53 GMTeh, Correction I mean a 3.5x and 5.3x perf improvement, Marc's protobuf-net serializer shows the 6.72x and 10.18x improvement. http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment4http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment4Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:16:16 GMTThis is my observation as well, at our company we have C#, Ajax and C++ clients for our web services. The C# client only involves 1 line of code to call our web services (since we're able to re-use our web service DataContract's) where for the C++ client we've had to generate (1000's of lines) of xml parsing code to parse the xml into our generated C++ model. What was interesting was on the first cut the C++ client was nearly 1.5x times slower than the C# client and it was only after spending a lot of time doing heavy optimizations were we able to get it on par with the C# client. The lack of reflection and the ability to generate 'custom cached code paths' mean that for some tasks it will be *extremely hard* for C++ to have better performance that their C# equivalents. An example of this would be a for object serializers/deserializers (like Marc's protobuf-net), I'm able to use 'cached generic static classes' to embed a compiled delegate in the static constructor and avoid any runtime penalties of working out the right code-path to use. Initial benchmarks are promising as I'm able to achieve a 6.72x and 10.18x perf increase over Microsoft's Xml and Json DataContract serializers - whilst only being ~1.92x slower than Marc's extremely fast binary protobuf-net serializer: [www.servicestack.net/.../...-times.2010-02-06.html](http://www.servicestack.net/benchmarks/NorthwindDatabaseRowsSerialization.1000000-times.2010-02-06.html) http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment3http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment3Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:34:37 GMTOh, also: > "Write my own string parsing routines" If that is C#/UTF8, I'd be interested to hear what you've done differently and what your results were. I'm currently using Encoding/Encoder etc, with byte*/char* and a custom interner - have you gone far from this? http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment2http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment2Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:56:35 GMTSounds very familiar. And indeed it is interesting that the tests don't evolve the C# version past the 2nd attempt. Like with the sprint you describe, I'm doing something very similar in protobuf-net at the moment, and *if the scenario warrants* you of course *can* always take the managed code another level (for example, I'm currently rewriting part of the pb-net core to use yet-more meta-programming, making the IL at execution minimal). I wonder what the graphs would have looked like if the same level of rework had been done between C# / C++. I wouldn't necessarily expect C# to be faster than C++, but I suspect you could remove the word "soundly". http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment1http://ayende.com/4392/performance-optimizations-managed-code-and-leaky-abstractions#comment1Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:52:43 GMT